Mr Scobie's arrival at the nursing home of St Christopher and St Jude - and into the clutches of Matron Hyacinth Price - is accidental. Self-educated and still preserving the gift of idyllic memory and wish, Mr Scobie stands apart from the others. For long term resident and eccentric, Miss Hailey, he represents a kindred spirit; for Matron Price - a lady of questionable practices - the latest victim...

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.

Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as 'Lily' in Lima in 1950, when she arrives one summer out of the blue, claiming to be from Chile but vanishing the moment her claim is exposed as fiction. He loves her next in Paris, where she appears as the enchanting 'Comrade Arlette', an activist en route to Cuba, and becomes his lover, albeit an icy remote one, who denies knowing anything about the Lily of years gone by. Whoever the bad girl tuens up as - whether it's Madame Robert Arnoux, the wife of a high-ranking UNESCO official, or Kuriko, the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman - and however poorly she treats him, Ricardo is doomed to worship her.

Robert Kincaid is a man with little but memories - memories of a lonely existence lived mostly on the road and memories of Francesca Johnson, the woman whose passion he stirred so briefly and with such power. Searching for something undefined, something to give meaning to the rest of his life, Kincaid takes to the road again, heading once more for Roseman Bridge in Madison County, Iowa, the place of his great love affair.

A climbing holiday has brought David Jones to the West Coast of Scotland. Fate has introduced him to Donald. As the days grow into weeks, he finds that fishing for lobster and herring is unlike anything he has done before. As he progresses from being a Green Hand to a practised fisherman, David takes to his new life with relish. The days of his strict chapel-going home in Wales are far behind him. Fishing has become his one obsession

When Raf realises his dream and becomes an airforce pilot, he lives to fly, until a mysterious illness takes his wings away. At his lowest, and in constant pain, he finds solace in Nietzsche whose writings promise a cure of a different kind. While on a pilgrimage in Nietzsche's footsteps, he meets Hilary, a doctor haunted by the deaths of her patients. Together they travel from the Riviera to the Swiss Alps before their journey ends in Turin, where Nietzsche went mad.

Edward Maichin's eloquent sermons and blond good looks have ensured his popularity amongst his congregation in the small Welsh mining community where he and his family live. But at home, the dark side of Edward's character runs riot, and since his errant father ran away to America, his mother and younger siblings have been powerless to prevent Edward's cruelty which dominates their lives. Only his younger sister Theo, a gifted writer haunted by her stillborn twin, is brave enough to defy Edward's hypocrisy.

For eighteen years the Hartes and the Golds have lived next door to each other, sharing everything from Chinese food to chicken pox to carpool duty. Parents and children alike have been best friends, so it's no surprise that in high school Chris and Emily's friendship blossoms into something more. They've been soul mates since they were born. So when midnight calls from the hospital come in, no one is ready for the appalling truth; Emily is dead at seventeen from a gunshot wound to the head. There's a single unspent bullet in the gun that Chris took from his father's cabinet - a bullet that Chris tells police he intended for himself. But a local detective has doubts about the suicide pact that Chris has described.

As befits the hero of a modern fairy tale, Lawrence Frost has neither father nor siblings, and fits so awkwardly into his worldly mother's life, he might have dropped from the sky. Like many such a hero, he grows up happier with plants than people. Whilst he is straightforward, honest, and a doting dad, he can be a difficult, taciturn husband -- but he's the last person one would suspect of being a killer...

When the spoilt and haughty Dona Constanza tries to divert a river to fill her swimming pool, she starts a running battle with the locals. The skirmishes are so severe that the Government dispatches a squadron of soldiers led by the fat, brutal and stupid Figueras to deal with them.