What do Mrs H, Rachel, Edwina, Ida, Sarah, Dot, Chrissie have in common? They're all women, but they're fat, thin, old, young, married or single. This title follows the ripples that go out into ordinary lives that changed by a shared experience, all connected by the same hospital clinic in a small Northern town.

Georgy is young, gregarious and fun - she is also large, self- confessedly ugly and desperate for love.

The attack on 15-year-old Joe Kennedy was vicious. Sheila Armstrong's grandson Leo, usually a quiet boy, was found holding a knife. Harriet Kennedy cannot cope with her son's pain; and Sheila, who reared Leo, cannot bear the guilt. This book presents a moving tale about how two women confront the complex range of emotions that motherhood entails.

Following the fictional adventures of an early 20th century painting, this novel also looks at the women whose lives it touches, and what it means to be a woman and an artist.

What happens after a tragedy in the family? A teenager has died in mysterious circumstances and the different ways in which the mother and father respond to this and how it affects the other siblings are at the heart of this novel.

The curiously named Isamay, a would-be academic, is trying to write a coherent thesis about grandmothers in history - from Sarah Bernhardt and George Sand to the matriarchal Queen Victoria and other influential grannies -- while constantly ambushed by the secrets her own family has been keeping. An only child, she is named after her grandmothers, Isa and May, who were there at her birth and who have formed and influenced her in very different ways. Jealous of each other, they both want to be first in their granddaughter's affections. Isa has an edge, in that young Isamay looks like her, but...

A powerful, moving story about motherhood, abandonment and guilt which casts a shadow across generations.
Born in Carlisle in 1887, brought up in a children's home and by reluctant relatives, Evie, with her wild hair and unassuming ways, seems a quiet, undemanding child.
Shona, born almost seventy years later, is headstrong and striking. She grows up in comfort and security in Scotland, the only child of doting parents. But there are, as she discovers, unanswered questions about her past.
The two girls have only one thing in common: both were abandoned as babies by their mothers....

'I was born on 25th May, 1938, in the front bedroom of a house in Orton Road, a house on the outer edges of Raffles, a council estate. I was a lucky girl.'

So begins Margaret Forster's journey through the houses she's lived in, from that sparkling new council house, to her beloved London home of today. This is not a book about bricks and mortar though. This is a book about what houses are to us, the effect they have on the way we live our lives and the changing nature of our homes: from blacking grates and outside privies; to cities dominated by bedsits and lodgings;...