A Liverpool song

Sample

Nadine Dorries

In the Four Streets in Liverpool, a dreadful murder has been committed, and 14-year-old Kitty Doherty is pregnant with the dead man's child. This secret is so dangerous that her mother, Maura, and the redoubtable Kathleen, her best friend Nellie's grandmother, decide the girls must be spirited away quietly to Ireland to await the birth of the baby. But back in Liverpool, the police are not giving up their search for the truth. Somewhere, in this tight-knit Irish Catholic community, someone must know something. Someone surely will talk one day. The streets are alive with gossip and rumour and it isn't easy to keep a secret that big.

Sample

Ruth Rendell

Dex works as a gardener for Dr Jefferson at his home on Hexam place in Pimlico: an exclusive street of houses inhabited by the rich and serviced by the not so rich. The hired help, a motley assortment of au pairs, drivers and cleaners, decide to form the Saint Zita Society (Zita being the patron saint of domestic servants) as an excuse to meet at the local pub and air their grievances. When Dex is invited to join them, they find him to be a strange man, ill at ease - and these first impressions are compounded when they discover he has recently been released from a hospital for the criminally insane, where he was incarcerated for attempting to kill his own mother ...

Sample

Suzanne Goodwin

Catherine and Sara share the same father—and that is all they share. Catherine, a reserved English aristocrat, grew up at her family's country estate in the years before the First World War. Sara, a passionate red-headed beauty, lived with her selfish socialite mother in a marble palace on the French Riviera. Catherine is a confirmed virgin; Sara made love to a stranger to celebrate the Armistice. Within the rapidly-changing world of between-the-wars England, the two strong personalities clash in a struggle to control the international auction-house founded by their father. It's a time of new freedoms for women - in enterprise and in sexuality. But sex doesn't guarantee romantic involvement, and a "financially wise" marriage can bring both profit and loss. Readers of Suzanne Goodwin's earlier novels Cousins and Sisters will welcome Daughters with the knowledge that they're in the hands of a master storyteller with a special insight on the modern woman's heart.

Sample

Marcia Willett

She was one of the world's leading ballerinas, until a tragic accident forced Mim to give up dancing. A friend who ran a stage school persuaded Mim to join the business. Mim accepted the offer when it was agreed that the dancing classes would be Mim's own special province. Now, nearly twenty five years later, history is repeating itself.