It is 1792, and Europe is seized by political turmoil and violence. Lizzie Fawkes has grown up in Radical circles where each step of the French Revolution is followed with eager idealism. But she has recently married John Diner Tredevant, a property developer who is heavily invested in Bristol’s housing boom, and he has everything to lose from social upheaval and the prospect of war. Soon his plans for a magnificent terrace built above the 200-foot drop of the Gorge come under threat. Tormented and striving Diner believes that Lizzie’s independent, questioning spirit must be coerced and subdued.

It’s London, 1960. The Cold War is at its height, and a spy may be a friend or neighbor, colleague or lover. Two colleagues, Giles Holloway and Simon Callington, face a terrible dilemma over a missing top-secret file. At the end of a suburban garden, in the pouring rain, Simon’s wife, Lily, buries a briefcase containing the file deep in the earth. She believes that in doing so she is protecting her family. What she will learn is that no one is immune from betrayal or the devastating consequences of exposure.

Daniel Branwell has survived the First World War and returned to the small fishing town where he was born. As he works on the land, struggling to make a living in the aftermath of war, he is drawn deeper and deeper into the traumas of the past and memories of his dearest friend and his first love. Above all, as the drama unfolds, Daniel is haunted by the terrible, unforeseen consequences of a lie.

In the winter of 1952, Isabel Carey, a lonely housewife who has recently relocated to the Yorkshire countryside with her new husband Philip, discovers an old RAF greatcoat hidden in the back of a cupboard of her house. While sleeping under the coat for warmth that night, she is visited by a young RAF pilot named Alec and begins an affair with him. She is unprepared, however, to face the truth of who Alec really is.

Internationally acclaimed author Helen Dunmore follows her bestselling novel, THE SIEGE, with a riveting and emotionally absorbing portrait of postwar Soviet Russia, a world of violence and terror where the severest acts of betrayal can come from the most trusted allies. 

The Siege of Leningrad was one of the key events of the twentieth century. In 1941, Hitler’s armies encircled Leningrad, confidently expecting to crush any resistance and enter the city. But Leningrad held out, in spite of almost unbelievable suffering. This novel focuses on the Levin family and their friends, trapped inside the besieged city. It’s a novel about war as experienced by ordinary people, and a profoundly moving celebration of love, life and survival.

Disturbing love and underlying horror govern the hermetic world of this Gothic novel set in early twentieth-century England. Catherine and Rob Allen, siblings two years apart, grow up in a world of shameful secrets. Their mother abandons them when they are young, and their father dies after being institutionalized. The children live with their grandfather in a crumbling country estate accompanied by their dependable maid, Kate, and a malicious tutor, Miss Gallagher. Together they forge a passionate refuge for themselves while the world outside moves to the brink of war.