"Maria Markham had survived the War only to tolerate the Occupation — barely, while daily facing haunting memories of loss. But then Max Woodard, an enigmatic Army colonel with a gentle heart, offered her passion and a loving partnership in a brave new world... Though a former prisoner of war, Colonel Max Woodard vowed to deal fairly with the Southerners under his governance. He yearned to

Shortlisted for the 2017 Text PrizeToday would have been an ordinary Saturday, except that two things happened:1) The peacocks escapedand2) I started writing this story.Dad says if you want to write a story you should start by choosing a topic that you know a lot about. That's why this is a story about peacocks. I know a lot about peacocks because:(a) Two peacocks live in the holiday flats across the road from meand(b) I'm good at finding them when they go missing.The last time William Shakespeare and Virginia went missing Cassie found them sitting on a coiled hose behind the fire station, and Dad called her 'Cassie Andersen, Peacock Detective'. So this time she knows what to do—she'll look for clues and track them down. But the clues lead her in an unexpected direction and Cassie finds herself investigating a confusing mystery about her family.The Peacock Detectives is a warm and engaging story...

Award-winning author Alice Mattison's new novel explores the hard choices a young woman and her friends made decades earlier at the height of the Vietnam War.Decades ago in Brooklyn, three girls demonstrated against the Vietnam War, and each followed a distinct path into adulthood. Helen became a violent revolutionary and was killed in a protest in 1970. Val wrote a controversial book, Bright Morning of Pain, which was essentially a novelization of Helen's all-too-short but vibrant life. And Olive became an editor and writer, now comfortably settled with her husband, Griff, in modern-day New Haven.When Olive is asked to write an essay about Val's book, a work that attracts and repulses her in equal measure, doing so brings back to the forefront Olive and Griff's tangled histories and their complicated reflections on that tumultuous time in their young lives. Things only become more fraught when Griff borrows Olive's treasured first edition of the...

The third book in the stunning 'River Maid' series from Sunday Times bestseller, Dilly Court is available to pre order now! Standing on London's Victoria docks with the wind biting through her shawl, Rose Munday realises she's been abandoned by her sweetheart. She had risked everything to get to London but, stumbling through the peasoup fog, she has nowhere to go, and no one to turn to. Scared and alone, Rose steps straight into danger, only to be rescued by two women with even less to their names – a woman of the night and her young sidekick, Sparrow. With only a cluster of love letters to her name and all hope of her sweetheart's return fading, Rose finds herself forging a new life with her unlikely companions. But when a good deed turns sour, a dangerous enemy threatens to ruin them all. Will Rose be able to save her new friends and her future? If she can, a Christmas gift awaits that will change her life forever...

British weather is always unpredictable, but the Spring of 1980 was something else entirely – snow, hail, floods, drought and sometimes the whole ticket. Trucks were overturned, motorways closed, trees uprooted, crops flattened. When the sun finally rose on Stickle Island – stuck out there, a mile off Dymchurch in County Kent – six bales of primo marijuana had washed up on shore. Stickle Island follows the island's myriad residents as they come up with a (not entirely agreed upon) plan to form a co-op and use the profit from pot sales to save the island's only ferry, which, thanks to the miserly Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, has just been placed on the chopping block. There's hot-tempered and anarchic DC, a soused farmer Henry Stick, his bitter rival John, a horny vicar, an even hornier Postmistress, and their collected offspring: a clutch of teen punks, all of whom could use a leg up, or at least, a decent toke. Unfortunately for them, a violent and wildly...