Mourning Ruby explores identity and maternal ties and is bestselling author Helen Dunmore's eighth novel. Rebecca was abandoned by her mother in a shoebox in the backyard of an Italian restaurant when she was two days old. Her life begins without history, in the dark outdoors. Who is she, where has she come from and what can she become? Thirty years later, married to Adam, she gives birth to Ruby, and to a new life for herself. But when sudden tragedy changed the course of that life for ever, and all the lives that touch hers, Rebecca is out in the world again, searching . . . 'Moments that...

Living at the heart of sophisticated Roman society at the time of Pompey, Crassus and Julius Caesar, Catullus is obsessed with Clodia, the Lesbia of his most passionate poems. He is jealous of her husband, of her maid, even of her pet sparrow. And Clodia? Catullus is 'her dear poet', but possibly not her only interest.

Unloved by their distant mother, Isabel and Nina cemented their bond in childhood when tragedy struck the family. Many yeas later, with the difficult birth of Isabel's first child, it is Nina who comes to stay and help out her older sister. But Nina has other, important reasons for being under her sister's roof.

Nadine, a sixteen-year-old runaway new to London, is set up in a decaying Georgian house by her Finnish lover, Kai. Slowly, she begins to suspect that Kai's plans for her have little to do with love.