Helen Dunmore

Following on from The Siege (6023): Leningrad in 1952 is a city recovering from war, where Andrei, a young doctor and Anna, a nursery teacher, are forging a life together. Trying hard to avoid coming to the attention of the authorities their private happiness is threatened in a country ruled by whispers and watchfulness where betrayal can come from those closest to you.

Roman society at the time of Pompey, Crassus and Caesar, - civilisation and violence are equals, murder is the easy option and poison is the weapon of choice. Catullus' relationship with Clodia is one of the most passionate, tormented and candid in history. Their story exposes the beauty and terrors of Roman life in the late Republic.

Sapphire, Conor and their Mer friends Faro and Elvira are ready to make the crossing of Ingo - a dangerous journey that only the strongest young Mer are called upon to make. Ervys and his new recruits, the sharks, are determined that Sapphire and Conor must be stopped - dead or alive.

A devastating flood has torn through the worlds of Air and Ingo, and now, deep in the ocean, a monster is stirring. Sapphy must return to the deep with the help of her friend the whale to face this terrifying creature, but her brother Conor and Mer friend Faro will not let her go alone!

Helen Dunmore passed away in June 2017, leaving behind this remarkable collection of short stories. With her trademark imagination and gift for making history human, she explores the fragile ties between passion, love, family, friendship and grief, often through people facing turning points in their lives.

In the winter of 1952, Isabel Carey moves to Yorkshire with her husband Philip, a GP. With Philip spending long hours on call, Isabel finds herself isolated and lonely. She discovers an old RAF greatcoat in the back of a cupboard and sleeping under it for warmth, she starts to dream. Not long afterwards, she is startled by a knock at her window…

In 1901, when Finland was resisting Russian rule, Eeva, the orphaned daughter of a revolutionary is sent to a country orphanage. She is eventually drawn back to Helsinki and her childhood comrades who are fighting for freedom. X rated, contains offensive language and explicit sex.

A spellbinding magical adventure. Master storyteller Helen Dunmore writes the story of Sapphire and her brother Conor, and their discovery of INGO, a powerful and exciting world under the sea.

You'll find the mermaid of Zennor inside Zennor church. She fell in love with a human, but she was a Mer creature and so she couldn't come to live with him up in the dry air. She swam up the stream to hear him sing, then one day he swam down it and was never seen again. He became one of the Mer people.

Sapphire's father told her that story when she was little. When he is lost at sea she can't help but think of that old myth; she's convinced he's still alive.

The following summer her brother Conor keeps disappearing for hours on end. She goes to the cove to find him, but instead meets Faro, an enigmatic and intriguing Merman. He takes her to Ingo and introduces her to a world she never knew existed. She must let go of all her Air thoughts and embrace the sea and all things Mer.

After her first visit she is entranced - merely the sound of running water makes her yearn to be in Ingo once more. Ingo blood runs strongly in Sapphy and Conor fears she will leave the Air world for good. He pleads with her to ignore her craving for the sea and stay safely in their cottage up on the cliff.

But not only is Sapphy intoxicated by the Mer world, she longs to see her father once more. And she's sure she can hear him singing across the water.
"I wish I was away in Ingo. Far across the briny sea."

To be alive is to be inside the wave, always travelling until it breaks and is gone. These poems explore the borderline between the living and the dead - the underworld and the human living world, and the exquisitely intense being of both.

Cornwall, 1920. A young man stands on a headland, looking out to sea. He is back from the war, homeless and without family. Behind him lies the terror of the trenches. Behind him is also the most intense relationship of his life. Daniel has survived, but will he ever be able to escape the terrible, unforeseen consequences of a lie? Richard & Judy Bookclub

Besieged by the German Army, the people of Leningrad face shells, starvation and the Russian winter. Like many other people the Levin family struggles to stay alive through the Siege.

Cathy and her brother, Rob, don't know why they have been abandoned by their parents. Alone in their grandfather's decaying country house, they roam the wild grounds freely with minds attuned to the rural wilderness. Lost in their own private world, they seek and find new lines to cross. But as the First World War draws closer, crimes both big and small threaten the delicate refuge they have built. Cathy will do anything to protect their dark Eden from anyone, or anything, that threatens to destroy it.

Morveren lives with her parents and twin sister Jenna on an island off the coast of Cornwall - an island that in the long distant past was devastated by a tidal wave…only some of those taken by the sea may not have been lost at all. Morveren's life changes when she finds a beautiful teenage boy in a rock pool after a storm.

Sapphire and Conor can't forget their adventures in Ingo, the mysterious world beneath the sea. They long to see their Mer friends and swim with the dolphins once more but a crisis is brewing far below the ocean's surface where the wisest of the Mer guards the tide knot.

Spring, 1917, and war haunts the Cornish coastal village of Zennor. Into this turmoil come D H Lawrence and his German wife, Frieda hoping to escape the war-fever that grips London. But the dark tide of gossip and innuendo means that Zennor is neither a place of recovery nor of escape..