There's no way to soften this, so I'll say it outright. I already have a wife.' In a single sentence, Walter Radcliffe destroyed everything Kate Sullivan had lived for up to their wedding day. Conventional family life in 1920s rural Somerset left her totally unprepared for the shame and disgrace of being jilted. Desperate to escape, she accepts the insulting gifts of Walter's money and his sham wedding ring and flees to the honeymoon hotel in Bournemouth to try and forget.

Includes three long elegiac stories and two short ones featuring an 'irresistible' female eccentric, the jealous relationship between a mother and daughter and the success of a sluttish Delilah in robbing a middle-aged woodcutter of both his hoarded wealth and his inner serenity.

For the first time in her life, Selina Bruce wasn't sure what tomorrow would bring. She had impulsively left behind her lawyer fiance in London and flown alone to a tiny island off the Spanish coast. She was searching for the father she'd never known, but what she found was an unexpected truth about herself and the man she planned to marry. For exotic San Antonio offered Selina more than the penetrating brilliance of the noonday sun. It offered the mysterious George Dyer, who held the key not only to her past..... but to her heart.

Pearl Louis Brandt has a terrible secret which she tries desperately to keep from her mother, Winnie Louie. And Winnie has long kept her own secrets - about her past and the confusing circumstances of Pearl's birth. Fate intervenes in the form of Helen Kwong, Winnie's so-called sister-in-law, who believes she is dying and must unburden herself of all falsehoods before she flies off to heaven. But, unfortunately, the truth comes in many guises, depending on who is telling the tale....... Thus begins a story that takes us back to Shanghai in the 1920s, through WWII, and the harrowing events that lead to Winnie's arrval in America in 1949.

The story of four mothers and their first-generation Chinese-American daughters; two generations of women struggling to come to terms with their cultural identity.

Olivia Yee is only five years old when Kwan, her older sister from China, comes to live with the family and turns her life upside down, bombarding her day and night with ghostly stories of strange ancestors from the world of Yin. Olivia just wants to live a normal American life.
For the next thirty years Olivia endures visits from Kwan and her ghosts, who appear in the living world to offer advice on everything from restaurants to Olivia's failed marriage. But, just when she cannot bear it any more, the revelations of a tragic family secret finally open her mind to the startling truths hidden in Kwan's unorthodox vision of the world.

'She wondered what her mother would have made of Amelia, Magnus, Gabriel, Clelia, and Annunciata, let alone Sebastian and Candida.' Clara's mother would have made very little of them, but the girl from Northam was very much at home in their 'tender, blurred world'. After all, it was so much more 'real' than the world of the folks back home. Clara could become the golden girl and have real affairs with married men, just like in the novels.

This is the story of Daisy Goodwill, from her birth on a kitchen floor in Manitoba, Canada, to her death in a Florida nursing home nearly ninety years later. Her ordinary life is made extraordinary in the telling.

Before her marriage, Catherine Fox had been a successful features writer, within an ace of taking over the editorship of Australia's most glossy magazine. Then she met Paul Grant. Attraction had been mutual and the time was right. Four years later, and with three young children, Catherine feels like an unequal partner in their life together. Paul's body seems untouched by fatherhood, but hers is like a stranger's - with lines and marks and bulk where none had been before. Resentments hidden behind politeness do more to poison their relationship than outright anger. Into the domestic drama walks Andromeda, the spiky-haired nanny, Janie the glamorous former girlfriend, and Henry.....dear Henry

Alex Wilde has got it bad....She's 27, single, bored out of her tiny mind at work and surrounded by flatmates that would make a glitterball feel square. She's got the world's worst case of Venus Envy. Her little sister Gail is pretty, waif-like and irritating. Femme fatale Keisha is flying up the ladder of success at work. And Bronwen is so hip, it's a miracle she can walk at all!