The novel contains imagined lives that achieve a kind of meaning and intensity our own lives do not. Out of the novelist's moral imagination-the breadth and depth of his awareness of human motivations, tensions, and complexities-emerge fictional persons through whom we learn to read ourselves. This eloquent book, exploring fictional lives in crucial moments of choice and change, stresses both their difference from and their deep connections with life. Martin Price writes here about ways in which character has been conceived and presented in the novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth...

Sets each of the seven wonders in their historical context, bringing together materials from ancient sources and the results of modern excavations to suggest why particular places and objects have been seen as the touchstone for human achievement.

1963: the death of JFK and the birth of Dr Who. A craft passes over Billy Flowers's head, and he is doused in a strange, green mist. Billy, the Head Porter at Wentworth Train Station, becomes sick...but he also gains the ability to see people's darkest secrets. This would be a blessing for the detectives conducting a murder investigation, but for Billy it becomes a curse. He begins to realise the people he loves can no longer be trusted. Including his own wife. But Billy is suffering enough. His brother Stanley is in a coma. Then a teenage girl goes missing. As murder begins to surround him,...

1966. For the past five years, Ewan Redstone has bullied and neglected his youngest son, Tommy. There seems to be no way out for Tommy, or for Cale, Tommy's older brother. Then one day Cale finds his father trapped under a pile of wood. He will die under there if Cale doesn't get help. But never mind help. In a moment of dark clarity, Cale ends his father's life, and at last he and Tommy are free. Then Cale makes a shocking discovery. He finds his mother's dead body buried in an old stable at the back of their house. It seems she didn't leave home after all, that Cale's father must have...