On a ship bound for England to visit her aging father after her stepmother summons her home, Maisie Dobbs realizes she isn’t ready to return. Against the wishes of the captain, who warns her, “You will be alone in a most dangerous place,” she disembarks in Gibraltar. Days after her arrival, a photographer and member of Gibraltar’s Sephardic Jewish community is murdered, and Maisie becomes entangled in the case and renews an uneasy acquaintance in the process.

Dana Catrell is shocked when her neighbor, Celia, is brutally murdered. To Dana’s horror, she was the last person to see Celia alive. Suffering from mania, the result of her bipolar disorder, she has troubling holes in her memory, including what happened on the afternoon of Celia’s death. The closer she comes to piecing together the shards of her broken memory, the more she falls apart. Is there a murderer lurking inside of Dana...or is there one out there in the shadows of reality, waiting to strike again?

In 1944, just days after the liberation of Paris, Charles Jackson sees something horrific: a man in a dark tunnel, apparently drinking the blood of a murdered woman. Terrified, he does nothing, telling himself afterward that worse tragedies happen during war. Seven years later, he returns to the city --- and sees the same man dining in the company of a fascinating, beautiful young woman. When they leave the restaurant, Charles decides to follow.

In the spring of 1924, Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes agreed to perform a dangerous job for the emperor of Japan. At the time, Russell encountered a young Japanese woman on board their ship who tutored the two foreigners about her country and guided them into a secret meeting with the Prince Regent himself. Now, when Russell heads for Oxford to resume her long-delayed studies, she comes face-to-face with that very same young Japanese woman --- and quickly realizes that Miss Sato Haruki is not all that she seems.

In the ruins of a future America, 15-year-old Ice Cream Star and her nomadic tribe live off of the detritus of a crumbled civilization. Before reaching the age of 20, they all die of a mysterious disease. When her brother begins showing signs of the disease, Ice Cream Star sets off on a bold journey to find a cure. Led by a stranger, a captured prisoner named Pasha who becomes her devoted protector and friend, Ice Cream Star plunges into the unknown, risking her freedom and ultimately her life.

Forced to accompany her new mistress to Italy, under-cook Biddy Leigh documents her adventures and culinary discoveries in an old household book of recipes. In London, she finds herself attracted to her mistress’s younger brother. In France, she discovers her mistress’s dark secret. At last, in Italy, Biddy becomes embroiled in a murderous conspiracy, knowing that the secrets she holds could be the key to a better life --- or her downfall.

France, 1939. In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says goodbye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn't believe that the Nazis will invade France...but invade they do. When a German captain requisitions Vianne's home, she and her daughter must live with the enemy or lose everything. As danger escalates all around them, she is forced to make one impossible choice after another to keep her family alive. Vianne's sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious 18-year-old girl. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets Gäetan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love. But when he betrays her, Isabelle joins the Resistance and never looks back, risking her life time and again to save others.

Otto finds a note left by his wife in the kitchen of their farmhouse in windswept Saskatchewan. Eighty-three-year-old Etta will be walking 3,200 kilometers to see the ocean, but somehow, Otto understands. He took his own journey once before, to fight in a faraway land. With Etta gone, Otto struggles with his demons of war, while their friend Russell initially pursues the woman he has loved from afar. And James --- well, James you have to meet on the page.

When Gaby Baillieux releases the Angel Worm into Australia’s prison computer system, hundreds of asylum-seekers walk free. And because the Americans run the prisons, the doors of some 5,000 jails in the United States also open. Is this a mistake, or a declaration of cyber war? Felix Moore, known to himself as “our sole remaining left-wing journalist,” is determined to write Gaby’s biography in order to find the answers. But how can he get Gaby --- on the run, scared, confused and angry --- to cooperate?

HOW TO BE BOTH is a novel all about art’s versatility. Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it’s a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There’s a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real --- and all of life’s givens are given a second chance.