A delightful and touching novel set in post-war summer of 1946 as three young women embark on the adult world.

Eliza believes she could never hurt anybody. Her beauty, her religion, her concern for friends and neighbours give her - she thinks - an oracular power. Then, mysteriously, the newcomer across the road disappears, and no one will tell Eliza why.

Growing up in a boys' school where her father is housemaster, Marigold is convinced of her own plainness and peculiarity. Ripe for seduction by the wrong sort of boy, Marigold suffers comically in her pilgrimage through adolescence.

This collection brings together past and present, probing many and varied lives. The title story examines Jane Austen's love life, while others introduce a trio of mean-spirited and middle-aged Kensington widows, a dreaded stranger, and the mercurial changes in young love.

In 1904, when she was six, Polly Fint went to live with her two aunts in a house near the sea. There she stayed for 81 years, while the century raged around her, while Victorian order became chaos and nuclear dread. This is her story.

* A brilliant, witty and moving novel about keeping the faith in extreme adversity

During one glorious summer between the wars the realities of life and the sexual ritual dance of the adult world creep into the life of young Margaret Marsh. This novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

A 'violent experience' at the age of nine colours Jessica Vye's schooldays and her reaction to the world around her, for she has been told that she is, 'beyond all possible doubt', a born writer.

Shortlisted for the 2014 Folio Prize. Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat told with bristling tenderness and black humour the stories of that Titan of the Hong Kong law courts, Old Filth QC, and his clever, misunderstood wife Betty. Last Friends, the final volume of this trilogy, picks up with Terence Veneering, Filth's great rival in work and - though it was never spoken of - in love. Veneering's were not the usual beginnings of an establishment silk: the son of a Russian acrobat marooned in northeast England and a devoted local girl, he escapes the war to emerge in the Far East as a man...

Filth (Failed In London, Try Hong Kong) is a successful lawyer when he marries Elisabeth in Hong Kong soon after the War. Reserved, immaculate and courteous, Filth finds it hard to demonstrate his emotions. But Elisabeth is different - a free spirit. She was brought up in the Japanese Internment Camps, which killed both her parents but left her with a lust for survival and an affinity with the Far East. No wonder she is attracted to Filth's hated rival at the Bar - the brash, forceful Veneering. Veneering has a Chinese wife and an adored son - and no difficulty whatsoever in demonstrating his...