Run by Toby and Paula, the centre offers ordinary people a chance to learn from professional artists skilled in poetry, sculpture, ceramics, and the like. Artists like Greg, the New England poet, whose works are strangely absent; or Bob the lascivious potter who sells his Toby jugs to department stores.

Clare Paling has had to move to a drowsy village because of her successful husband's job. She finds it hard to fit into the small, closed community. It takes her involvement in the church's 4th century pageant and an unpardonable death to remind Clare that the world is an uncertain place.

Set in an imaginary country somewhere between Egypt and Libya, this book looks at the choices and lives of two central characters - Howard Beamish, a palaeontologist, and Lucy Faulkner, a journalist. Their stories are bound with tales of Callimbia from the time of Berenice, Cleopatra's sister.

A novel about an anthropologist who retires to a small Somerset village, where she finds that life is as subtle and elaborate as any she has encountered in her work. In particular, she tries to fathom her fierce neighbour who governs her family with a menacing force. From the author of BEYOND THE BLUE MOUNTAINS and HEAT WAVE.

Maria is always getting lost in the secret world of her imagination. So when she begins to hear things that nobody else does, she's not sure if they are real. Then Maria finds a Victorian embroidered picture, and feels a strange connection with the ten-year-old girl, Harriet, who stitched it.

City of the Mind is the second novel by Booker Prize winning author Penelope Lively. 'This is the city in which everything is simultaneous. There is no yesterday, nor tomorrow, merely weather, and decay, and construction.' In London's changing heartland, architect Matthew Halland is aware of how the past and the present blend. It stirs memories of his boyhood, the early years of his daughter Jane and the failed marriage that he has almost put behind him. Here too is the London of prehistory, of Georgian elegance, of the Blitz. But Matthew is occupied with constructing a new future for London...

Penelope Lively has turned her considerable literary talent to non-fiction with A House Unlocked, a meandering collection of memories inspired by Golsoncott, the Somerset country home occupied by her family for the greater part of the last century. By walking around the rooms of the house (in her mind) and looking at fondly remembered objects and furniture, she recalls the events, customs and people that together paint a slowly shifting picture of English country life in the 20th century. It is at once personal and social - a diary of the house and its occupants, and a memoir of the...

Searching through a little-used cupboard at home, Glyn Peters chances upon a photograph he has never seen before. Taken in high summer, it shows his wife, Kath, holding hands with another man. Glyn's work as a historian should have inured him to unexpected findings and reversals, but he is ill-prepared for this radical shift in perception.

Examines alternative destinies, choices and the moments in our lives when we could have chosen a different path. The author takes moments from her own life and asks 'what if' she had made other choices: what if she hadn't escaped from Alexandria at the outbreak of WWII? What would her life have been like if she had become pregnant when she was 18?

In 1935, privileged misfit Lorna meets the love of her life. Falling for a pennyless and bohemian artist, Matt, she abandons her stuffy Kensington existence in London and moves to a rustic cottage in Somerset. A baby, Molly, is born, but the coming war takes Matt - and Lorna's dreams - away.