Margaret Forster

Vivid and revealing account of the life and character of the celebrated author of 'Rebecca' and 'Jamaica Inn'

On the eve of the Great War, thirteen year old Millicent starts her diary which she continues for over eighty years. From these diaries we see the social and economic changes of the twentieth century through the eyes of a remarkable woman.

Tara Fraser leaves London to start a new life in a Cumbrian town selected at random. She plans to obliterate her past. But one of her new neighbours, Nancy, wants to become her friend. Tara fights to keep herself to herself, but can she do it? Slowly, reluctantly, she discovers the dangers of trying to suppress the past and reject other people.

Apart from being women, what do Mrs H, Edwina, Rachel, Ida Sarah, Dot and Chrissie have in common? They are all survivors, all connected to a clinic in a Northern town, who know what it means to live in the shadow of illness.

Isamay is trying to write a thesis about grandmothers in history, but is constantly pulled towards secrets in her own family. An only child she is named after her very different grandmothers Isa and May, jealous of each other as they both want to be the main influence in her life and her affections.

Lost, found, stolen, strayed, sold, fought over... This novel follows the fictional adventures, over a hundred years, of an early 20th-century painting and the women whose lives it touches. It is a novel about what it means and what it costs to be both a woman and an artist, and an unusual, compelling look at a beautiful painting and its imagined afterlife.

This is a fictionalised account of the love story between Robert and Elizabeth Browning. It is narrated by Elizabeth Wilson who was employed at Wimpole Street as a lady's maid.

A vicious, squalid knife attack on fifteen-year-old Joe Kennedy by Leo Armstrong leaves both families reeling. What is it like to bring up a thug? Or to be the mother of a victim? The pain of all those affected is explored skilfully.

When eighteen-year-old Miranda dies in a sailing accident her mother, Louise, and her siblings gradually come to terms with her death, but her father Don is determined to bring someone to account. Gradually his reaction to the tragedy starts to tear the family apart.

Born in Carlisle in 1887, brought up in a children's home and by reluctant relatives, Evie, with her wild hair and unassuming ways, seems a quiet, undemanding child.

Shona, born almost seventy years later, is headstrong and striking. She grows up in comfort and security in Scotland, the only child of doting parents. But there are, as she discovers, unanswered questions about her past.

The two girls have only one thing in common: both were abandoned as babies by their mothers. Different times, different circumstances, but these two girls grow up sharing the same obsession. Each sets out to stalk and then haunt her natural mother. Both mothers dread disclosure; both daughters seek emotional compensation and, ultimately, revenge.

Maudie Tipstaff leaves Glasgow for the first time to spend four months with each of her three children. What she finds in her children’s homes leads her to reassess her own life.