Small, dark and intense, Simon grows up aware that there is something different about him, something that causes late-night quarrels and sometimes tears. With the rise of Hitler in Germany and the coming of war to Sweden's neighbours, the tensions increase. Befriending a young Jew, Isak, who is quickly taken under his mother's wing, enriches Simon's life, but makes it more difficult too - for Isak seems to fit in much better at home than Simon does himself. With the war's end comes the day that Simon, no longer a child, must be told the reason for his affinity for the lake and its surrounding oak trees; for the strange dreams of an old man beneath the waves; for his dark good looks and uncanny musical ability

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.

In 1944, in war-torn Europe, a fifteen year old boy watches as his village his razed to the ground. From his hiding place high in a tree, he also witnesses the brutal murder of his childhood sweetheart by a soldier not much older than himself. Decades later, his terrible memories are revived when, by chance, he recognizes the soldier. From that moment, he devotes himself to destroying his enemy, by stealth and from afar. Until one fateful early summer morning in Oxford, the two men once again come face to face....then seemingly disappear without a trace. As young policewoman Juliet Furbo frantically searches for the missing men, she begins to uncover the disturbing connection between them.

France in the fateful summer of 1940. A retired solicitor on holiday in the Jura mountains is persuaded to escort two English children home to safety. As the Nazi war machine thunders towards the Channel, he takes five more waifs and strays under his wing, carrying them with him on his extraordinary odyssey across a France crumbling in abject defeat.....

In the brutal chaos of the Second World War, three people find their lives inextricably interwoven in a web of courage, betrayal and love. Julie Lescaux, the young Englishwoman caught up in one of the most dangerous operations of the French Resistance; Paul Vasson, vicious Paris pimp turned Nazi collaborator; David Freymann, German scientist caught up in unimaginable horror, destined to lose everything except his faith in his own discovery.

The jeep skidded perilously on the icy surface and Sergeant Willis stopped to put on the chains. While he fitted them, Major Mark Hanlon stepped out into the road and looked through his field glasses at the mountains. Then he saw the skier, a tiny black puppet, motionless. A moment later he began to move, gathering speed, in a flurry of snow - a wild, suicidal plunge down the dazzling hillside. Hanlon watched him, breathless, waiting for the fall. But he came onward, faster and faster, until they could see the grey of his uniform and the green flashes of the Alpenjager regiment and the rifle slung between his shoulder blades and the gleam of his polished pistol belt. An Austrian soldier, armed and in battle dress. Yet the war had been over for months now......

Bryan de Courcy Cavanagh, Australian in Paris, top-notch international lawyer, happily-married New World gentleman, is sixty-five. But arriving on his birthday is a sealed letter from Rome, bearing the arms of the ancient house of the Farnese di Mongrifone. Affectionate, imperious, it is a summons from the woman he loved - and lost - forty years previously,in the stormy, opportunistic world of post-war Europe......

At seventeen, Rose is convinced no one will ever love her, living as she does in the shadow of her beautiful older sister, Diana. If Diana is the swan, Rose is the ugly duckling. But for both girls this is going to be an extraordinary summer. It is 1943 and the war has left its mark even in the sleepy seaside town where the girls have been sent out of harms way. For the first time in their lives they are free of adult restriction.