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.

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.

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!

The bright dawn of the twentieth century finds itself shadowed by the strictures of the Victorian Age. Women, whatever their status in society, are still women and expected to conform to their well-defined role in life as mother and wife. For the Bannister girls, daughters of a wealthy and respected family, this is not enough. But the Great War, with all its horrors and degradation, brings with it opportunities for the girls - the stolen lives of a whole generation of young men slowly erode the man-made barriers to equality and fulfilment.

Dumped on her 30th birthday by the man she thought she would marry, Victoria Shepworth - known as Victoria 'Total Bloody Relationships Disaster' Shepworth to her friends - is feeling desperate. So desperate that she cuts her hair, temporarily considers becoming a lesbian, and even throws herself into internet dating. Armed with a new computer and an anonymous nickname, she soon starts to feel human again - especially when she starts receiving emails from a highly desirable Frenchman in Paris who claims to be a single white male seeking a single white e-mail.

Joyce Mitchell's beloved husband Mitch died five years ago. Since then she's kept her hands full and her mind and heart occupied by running The Sewing Circus, an all-girl group she founded to provide badly needed services like day care and job counselling to young women. Joyce's life is rich and full, but something is missing. What she doesn't have is that red dress she keeps dreaming about or the social life to suit it. And she may not have The Sewing Circus much longer due to funding cuts. Feeling defeated and pessimistic, Joyce reluctantly agrees to keep a date for dinner at the home of her best friend, Sister - a reverend like no other - and finds not only a perfect meal but a tall, dark stranger named Nate Anderson.